What is a firewall, and what is an NGFW?

A firewall controls what traffic is allowed in and out of your network, blocking malicious or unauthorised connections. A next-generation firewall (NGFW) goes further — inspecting traffic deeply to add intrusion prevention, application control, URL filtering, anti-malware and threat intelligence. Most business firewalls today are NGFWs, whether delivered as a hardware appliance or from the cloud.